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The father of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer describes his shock at hearing the news of his son's crimes, his entry into a world of complete denial, and how, during Jeffrey's trial, he placed himself in his son's shoes. 150,000 first printing.
- Sales Rank: #227997 in Books
- Brand: Brand: William Morrow and Company, Inc.
- Published on: 1994-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.75" h x 5.75" w x 1.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 255 pages
- Great product!
From Publishers Weekly
If readers are expecting sensational revelations from this earnest memoir by the father of mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, they will be disappointed. We are instead given a glimpse into the macabre life of one of the most demented killers in the nation's history, a man who kept a full human skeleton in his closet. Jeffrey was born in Milwaukee in 1960 after his mother had endured a very difficult pregnancy (after giving birth to another son, she would spend time in a mental institution). Jeffrey seemed like any other child; it was only as he grew older that he began to withdraw. His father sees many similarities between himself and his son: both are emotionally distant, fear abandonment, like to control people and feel inadequate. The author, a chemist, writes that he was so involved with his work that he never noticed that Jeffrey, even in high school, was an alcoholic. Dahmer goes on to recite his son's litany of failure: dropping out of college after only one semester; being kicked out of the army for his alcoholism; his interest in devil worship and seances. The strongest statement in the book is Dahmer's denial of an allegation made by a former male lover of Jeffrey's that he sexually abused his son as a teenager. A book for criminologists, psychiatrists and the ghoulish. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Although he knew his son Jeffrey was disturbed, the author, like most parents, hoped he was "just a blink away from redemption." Thus, he was as horrified as others when Jeffrey's gruesome serial murders of young men came to light. (See Anne E. Schwartz's The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough , LJ 4/15/92). In this brief, honest book, Dahmer, a research chemist, searches for answers to the question of how his son became a monster. In retrospect, there are some clues--Dahmer even speculates that he is "a man whose son was perhaps only the deeper, darker shadow of himself." While no one, not even his father, can ever really know what produces a Jeffrey Dahmer, this is brave, heart-wrenching testimony. The author's unique point of view reminds us that the lives a murderer ruins include those who loved him most. Recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/93.
- Gregor A. Preston, Univ. of California Lib., Davis
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Lionel Dahmer, father of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, here writes one of the most courageous, unsensational books ever written about serial murder. It does not even summarize Jeffrey's crimes. Dahmer takes upon himself much of the guilt for his son's acts by considering a genetic predisposition to murder he may have passed on to his son; various acts of his own moral blindness that may have contributed to his son's deprived emotional being; and things he did and didn't do when certain symptoms appeared that might have alerted him to Jeffrey's lust for sexual atrocity. What parts of the father, the book asks, are replicated in the son? Largely, Jeffrey is a failure whose failings were earlier those of his father, though the father overcame each failing as its pain grew. Intellectually and physically inferior as a child, Lionel was tutored by his parents from first grade on, and by dint of hard study earned a doctorate in chemistry. A puny child, he took up body-building as a teenager and turned himself into a fine physical specimen. But he also had murderous dreams from which he would awake trembling. Jeffrey's mother was also a depressive, and her excessive pill-taking during pregnancy may well have damaged Jeffrey's genes. As a child, he developed a testicular hernia that, when treated by surgery, gave him a fear of castration and seemed to lead into lasting withdrawal from his family and friendships and, by the time he was 15, into alcoholism and a liking for dead things. Lionel sees Jeffrey's main psychotic trigger lying in a need to control: his own need for intellectual and physical control resulted in a glass wall between himself and Jeffrey; Jeffrey's need for control grew into a need for drugged or dead lovers who submitted to him absolutely. Clear, modest, intelligent--and extremely disturbing. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
Candid, introspective, one-of-a-kind
By Jessica Lux
Lionel Dahmer's memoir is the story of the dark journey of a father who was faced with the grisly reality of one of America's most notorious serial murder, mutilation, rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism cases. Lionel was a father who had to grapple not with losing his son to these unspeakable horrors, but with the fact that his son was the perpetrator. As a father, Lionel was asked if he could forgive his son, but before he could determine that, he had to forgive himself. The book presents Lionel's struggle with guilt, bewilderment, anger, and personal chaos during his son's life and in the aftermath of his arrest.
The memoir stands alone in its straightforward prose, introspection, and complete lack of blame shifting. Lionel provides broads stroke of details of the crimes, focusing more on the individuals than on the headline-grabbing depravity of Jeffrey Dahmer's deviance. Throughout Jeffrey's youth, and during the trial, Lionel grappled with his own responsibility for his son's social maladjustment. He identified with his son's need for control, extreme fear of abandonment, and general solitary nature. Lionel even contrasts Jeffrey's zombie experiments with his own hypnosis-control experiments in childhood. After Jeffrey's arrest, Lionel never wanted him to go free, but he did hope and work for psychiatric treatment for the son he was never able to save.
Lionel, I applaud you condor and introspection. You've written a book that will no doubt provide comfort to many parents of difficult children, and will help frame many of the "why?" questions felt by Americans with regards to your son's crimes.
33 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Allowed To Drift
By Robert A. Deyes
A Father's Story by Lionel Dahmer is a harrowing account of a father trying to come to terms with the murderous crimes of his son. It is a story that brings us to the limits of belief in its descriptions of how a little boy became one of the nation's worst criminals. It is a true story that makes us ever cautious of our own children as they grow up in the modern world with all the influences that can lead children astray. But more than anything, A Father's Story is a warning to all of us that we need to be ever present for our sons and to provide direction and purpose for their lives. Lionel Dahmer is that father and Jeff Dahmer was that son.
From the beginning of Jeff's life we see a traumatic series of events that may have played an important role in molding the violent man that Jeff would later become. His mother, for example, struggled with severe health problems during the pregnancy- nervous seizures and extreme sensitivity to noise- sometimes taking as many as twenty six pills a day to relieve her symptoms. Moreover, the first years of Jeff's life seemed anything but stable. Jeff's family changed homes several times while Lionel worked hard at finishing his PhD. On top of his mother's continuing illness, this time was plagued by arguments between both parents. Indeed stress had reached a peak with Jeff's mother Joyce feeling condemned to spending all her days at home while Lionel spent all his days and sometimes much of the night working in the laboratory. By his own admission, the laboratory had become Lionel's obsession- his focus in life that would cause him to rush home for supper and back to the laboratory with barely a glimpse of Jeff as he played in the yard. With all its comfort and the predictability of its molecular reactions, the lab had literally become a refuge from the unpredictability of family life.
Gradually Jeff Dahmer the boy sank into his own world withdrawing from reality:"drifting toward that unimaginable realm of fantasy and isolation" as his family struggled to deal with its own brokenness. But Jeff clearly yearned for his father. At times he would clutch onto his father with joy sensing the security we all feel when our fathers come to our rescue. But these moments were rare- as he grew into a teenager, Jeff sunk further into his own "quagmire of inactivity" spending much of his time alone in his room or watching television. A different side of Jeff began to develop- a side that was curiously interested in collecting the remains of dead animals. Oblivious to these changes, Lionel could not fathom the depth of isolation that had gripped his own son's life. Indeed in his isolation, Jeff would gradually become an alcoholic turning to the bottle in desperation during his final years at school.
Jeff carried out his first murder at the age of eighteen. His mother had already deserted him, leaving him alone in her house to fall yet deeper into his insanity. Lionel's later attempts to send him to college ended up in disaster. With his absence from class and his ever increasing problem of drinking, Lionel pulled him out of college. With Jeff's unwillingness to work, Lionel finally sent him to the army hoping that the structured and disciplinary life style of the military would change his attitude and outlook. Initially things went very well for Jeff- his father noticed what appeared to be a transformation in attitude and appearance. But this moment of hope for his future came to an end when, three months before his military service was up, he was discharged, again because of his drinking.
Seemingly in desperation, Lionel suggested that Jeff leave their house in Bath, Ohio to live with his grandmother in West Allis Wisconsin. Lionel believed that the affectionate nature of his grandmother and the love that she felt for Jeff would offer the best environment for getting his life in order. Once again this period - which lasted over 6 years- was a time of great hope. Jeff helped out his grandmother with all the tasks and daily chores around the house. And yet free as he was from the safety net that only a father's love could provide, the sinister side of Jeff's character continued to develop unabated. He began to steal, he acquired a gun, he brought strangers back home and he took on a very curious interest in chicken bones which he bought from the store and treated with numerous household chemicals.
After moving out of his grandmother's house Jeff was arrested on charges of child molestation. For this he was sentenced to 5 years of probation with the first year in a work release program. Deep down, Lionel still believed that the innocence of the little boy that he had known in his son could be rescued, that Jeff's problems were all simply connected to his alcoholism and that with the right kind of psychiatric help his son would return to some level of normalcy and decency in his life. Little did Lionel know of the gruesome details of all that would later take place in his son's house and of the murders that his son had committed. Only later on, following his final arrest and the media frenzy that accompanied the trial of his son, would the sordidness and the perversity of his drift from sanity and humanity become apparent. Jeff had murdered through acts of violence that defy belief.
So ended all hope of Jeff Dahmer's rescue. As his trial proceeded Jeff showed little remorse for his acts. His father began to search his own inner self remembering his own childhood fantasies and nightly dreams as if they offered some explanation for what his son had done and what he had become. He remembered his own desire for control and power and his idea that his PhD would give him that power. As Jeff was sentenced to life imprisonment hundreds of letters, some religious in nature and some from people seeking comfort from Jeff for their own personal problems and life struggles, began pouring in. But it was the search for a cause- for some sort of reason, for a simple explanation- that occupied much of Lionel Dahmer's time.
Maybe it had been Jeff's genetic makeup, maybe his alcoholism and drug-taking, maybe the drugs that Lionel's first wife had taken during the difficult pregnancy or maybe even the violence that Jeff had been exposed to through television. But as speaker and author Robert Lewis suggests, perhaps more importantly than all of these might have been the lack of parental direction that could well have prevented Jeff from simply `drifting away' both as a child and as a teenager. Jeff had lacked the guidance a child s desperately needs. He had been left alone to drift. Dahmer's last words provide a stark warning to all of us fathers: "Take care, take care, take care". Ours is a world fraught with danger. Ours is a world in which we must take care of our own- our sons and daughters- to ensure that they become the men and women God wants them to be.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Provides Real Insights
By R. Schultz
Most accounts of the lives of serial killers just skim the surface. They itemize the atrocities committed, and, if they have ambitions of providing psychological insight, they recount the beatings and the poverty the perpetrator suffered as a youth. However this account does neither. It couldn't if it wanted to. That's because Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the few murderers who has no childhood history of abuse to explain his actions. So in this book, his father is forced to go deeper to try to find the roots of his son's aberrations.
The result is an anguished examination of the private festering that might have given rise to Jeffrey Dahmer's crimes. In the process of looking for early signs, early inklings, Lionel Dahmer traces many of the tendrils of the mad imaginings that he eventually found had ruled his son's life - back to himself. He says that in some ways, he believes his own obsessions might have been the shadowy precursors of his son's full-blown madness. Lionel Dahmer recounts how he was obsessed with fire, with bombs, with exercising mesmerizing control over others when he was a child.
He also discusses the medical conditions his wife suffered from around the time of her difficult pregnancy with Jeffrey. While he does consider that some twisted genetic inheritance might have dictated Jeffrey's behavior, he is still left with a benumbing sense of blame and shame.
There is a generally spare, somber, weighted tone to the writing in this book, although there are some very literate, almost poetic passages, as for example when Lionel admits that he buried himself so much in his work in the chemical analysis laboratory, that he saw Jeffrey only "in glimpses... felt him in snatches." Lionel describes how he played the role of dutiful father and husband, but didn't vitally experience either the joys or loves or sorrows that most people seem to get out of these relationships.
I had criticized a low-budget independent movie that was made based on this book, because the actors in it seemed so emotionless. The actor who played the father especially gave the appearance of sleepwalking through his performance. But this book suggests that that's how life was really lived for much of the time in this household. The father took the son fishing - played soccer with him. There were all the seeming normalcies - from Halloween parties - to a college enrolment. But if Lionel's self-criticisms are accurate, in truth all these Norman Rockwell tableaus took place as the aftermath of "The Invasion of the BodySnatchers." Everyone was actually a walking simulacrum, an emptiness posing as a real person.
Well, that is probably the case in many families, but hardly any children grow up to be cannibalistic serial killers. So the mystery of "Why?" remains. But this account goes farther than almost any other book on serial killers I've read in plumbing to the undertow of trouble that can flow in even the "best" families.
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